What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

by Helen Oyeyemi

  Aisha came in cradling her laptop in her arms. Day followed, hands helplessly rising and falling. “It’s not just the clip, it’s the comments,” she said, when she saw us.

  Ah yes, the comments.

  Noor couldn’t make himself look, so Aisha and I read some of them aloud. There was a lot of LOL cool allegations junkie, maybe it was all a dream? and LMAO people will say anything to ruin a good man’s reputation stay strong Matyas!

  If only that was the worst of it. Aisha’s haggard face as she read: Oh boohoo. What’s this one complaining about? He paid her, didn’t he? She hit him, didn’t she? Admitted all this herself. Does she think you can hit someone and just walk away? I read: She should count herself lucky: men probably treat broken down old whores worse than that in her country. And she got to bang Matyas! Matyas Füst can beat me up any time baby LOL

  Then the apologists came out to play: Even if this is true is it the full story? We know that Matyas wouldn’t just lash out like that so we need to be asking what she did . . .

  Day showed us a screenshot she’d saved. She’d posted a comment of her own: Guys are you being serious? I’m appalled and really scared by this and all the reactions I’m seeing . . . this isn’t the world I want to live in. She’d received so many replies telling her to kill herself that she’d decided to delete her account.

  “I still don’t think it’s true,” Aisha said. “He couldn’t have done something like this.” When Noor put on his solicitor voice to point out that the video had been up for half a day, had a view count of half a million, and would have had Matyas Füst’s team of lawyers swinging left and right if the content hadn’t had any basis in fact, Aisha said through gritted teeth: “But he hasn’t said anything at all.”

  “He’ll probably make a statement in the morning,” Noor said. We were failing as the men in Day and Aisha’s life. We weren’t doing what we were supposed to do. This came through very clearly in the way that Day and Aisha were looking at us, or more not looking at us, really.

  —

  THE MORNING brought no statement from Füst, and Noor sounded relieved (and ashamed of his relief) when he said: “Looks like she hasn’t got any proof and he’s going to ignore or deny it.” In the afternoon there were reports of an eyewitness to the beating coming forward, and about an hour after that Füst’s legal team announced that he’d voluntarily made himself available to the police for questioning.

  —

  AT THE CLINIC my concentration was poor and I mixed up checkout forms so that departing clients got to read details of each other’s low self-esteem and experience the outrage of not being unique. Tyche Shaw and I were on the same shift again, and got authorization to offer free secondary sleep sessions all round so we wouldn’t be sued. But like Aisha, Tyche was addicted to the YouTube clip. She spent her break time watching it over and over on her phone and ran the battery right down.

  “I found that one tough to watch,” I told her.

  “Really?” she said. “But it’s just someone talking about this time she got beaten up. No bullets or gore or bombs or anything. This is nothing compared to other things you can see on this site.”

  “I don’t know what to say. I can’t explain it.”

  “Well, I hope she sees the view count and accepts that as an answer to her question about whether people care. These numbers are up there with the numbers for footage of the world’s most brilliant strikers scoring the decade’s most brilliant goals. So it’s not that we’re indifferent . . . we care . . . just in a really really really fucked-up way . . .”

  Matyas Füst’s fiancée released a statement as we were leaving work: She was shocked and upset to hear of “the events described in the video” and would be paying the victim a visit to see if there was anything she could do for her. She had never seen a violent side to Matyas’s character but it was now undeniable that he’d been struggling with some issues and they’d be spending some time apart while he completed a course of anger management therapy.

  “No jail time for Füst . . . just a fine and some therapy,” Tyche predicted, even as she admired the photo of the prima ballerina, who was elfin and ethereal and all the rest of it.

  “Yeah, well, I beg to differ,” I said.

  Tyche stuck her hand out. “Bet you a hundred pounds.”

  “I suppose this is all just a joke to you, but I know a girl who’s pretty badly shaken up by all this.”

  Tyche sighed. “She was a fan?”

  “She’s still trying to be one, I think. Clinging to every possible delusion.”

  Tyche’s sigh deepened. “Let me know if intervention’s required.”

  “OK, thanks . . .” I had it in my mind to ask Tyche what she thought she might be able to do for a girl she’d never met—in a spirit of curiosity, not hostility—but had to hurry over to the House of Locks. Terry, the man who maintained Boudicca’s fish tank, was waiting for me to let him in. After Terry left I stayed a few more hours, reading Matyas Füst updates aloud to Boudicca, who looked suitably incredulous. YouTube woman was glad she’d had the chance to meet the woman she’d found herself taking a beating for and wouldn’t be pressing charges. She’d hit Füst first—that was an excessive response to some words he’d said, and his response in turn had been excessive; all she asked was acknowledgment of that. A sincere apology. So Matyas Füst was preparing a sincere apology.

  —

  HAS SHE READ ANY OF THE COMMENTS? That’s what I wondered. Did the woman from the YouTube video understand that the public wasn’t on her side? She made her requests with such placid mirth, as if talking into a seashell or a shattered telephone, as if Matyas Füst fans weren’t actively looking for her, probably in order to finish her off. Even those who’d begun to condemn Füst believed his apologies should be directed elsewhere (“It’s his fiancée I feel sorry for in all this . . .”). Those who claimed they wanted to feel concern for YouTube woman didn’t like that she’d filmed her allegations while high. And yet she might not have been able to talk about it sober.

  —

  NOOR TEXTED that he was considering taking Aisha’s laptop away until the Füst case died down. She seemed to have spent the entire evening engaged in a long and rambling argument with her friends via six-way video call. She attacked Füst’s reputation, defended it, then attacked again, berated the friends who’d gone off him for their faithlessness, cursed the infinite stupidity of his unchanged fans and threatened to put on a Füst mask and beat them up to see how they liked it. She’d skipped dinner again and was running a temperature. When was I coming home?

  Two firsts: being reluctant to leave Ched’s house and being reluctant to enter my own. I said I’d been at the gym. Ched does have a home gymnasium; he works out a lot, his body being his back-up plan in case he gets ugly again. But I don’t know why I lied.

  —

  AISHA WILL GET over this. But what of her tails and her plant-growing projects and the remarkably potent gin she was perfecting? “That gin was going to make us richer than an entire network of 1920s bootleggers,” I said, to see if that wouldn’t rouse her. She likes money. Now it seems she liked it because she could exchange it for Matyas Füst–related items. What worries Noor is that three of Aisha’s graven images fell off their pedestals at once: him, me, and Matyas Füst. The girls seemed to pity our weakness. Noor’s brusque talk of judicial process and media treatment. My awkward, awkward silence. Is it really bad that the girls have found us out, though? I never projected strength. Not on purpose, anyway.

  “What are you really worrying about, Noor?”

  He shuffled papers into his briefcase, rearranged his pens, straightened his tie. “It just . . . I think I’ve lost them. Just like that, overnight. Their mother says they’re fine with her . . .”

  I loosened the knot of his tie a little, just a little. It still looked neat, so he couldn’t complain.

  “
Nah. I don’t even know them as well as you do and I can tell they’re just thinking.” A casual overview of all their main emotional attachments reveals that Noor and his ex have been better parents than they realize; while Day and Aisha appreciate strength, lack of it isn’t a deal breaker in the matter of whether they respect a person or not.

  —

  ALL WAS QUIET on the Matyas Füst front for a few months; I kept an eye on that situation (among others) and read that the reporters who managed to get a sound bite out of Füst all got the same one. He was completing his anger management therapy and was still preparing his apology. This sound bite was paired with another obtained from YouTube woman: Looking forward to it.

  It was around that time Ched and I started talking again—not often, but enough. I’d be entering or leaving the House of Locks, the phone would ring, and it would be Ched. He described his current existence as a cycle of drills and chores, and was so tired he’d fall asleep mid-sentence. It was good to speak to him, not just because it was him but because he didn’t know the first thing about the incident that had rocked my household. When I gave him a brief outline he said: “Oh, you know the apology Füst’s preparing is going to be a song, right? And that song is going to become an anthem of repentance. It’s probably going to be called ‘Dress Made of Needles.’”

  “Nice—I’ll go down to the betting shop tomorrow.”

  There was something else I wanted to talk about while I had him on the line. When I answered his phone calls he needed half a second to adjust his greeting, and it sounded as if he was disappointed that I was the one who’d answered. Well, disappointed is too strong a word. It was more as if I wasn’t his first preference. Which was fine, except that I’m the only other person who has keys to his house. His mum’s been trying to get a set for years without success.

  “So what’s going on? You met someone?”

  “Not sure,” he said. “I . . . think so.”

  “And this person has keys?”

  After a lot more questioning he eventually confessed that he hadn’t given a set of keys to anybody else and had never actually met this woman in person, but was fairly sure that she had keys because she sometimes answered the phone when he called. When he said that I adjusted my position so that I was able to watch all the open doors and I said: “That’s wonderful, Ched. I’m really happy for you.”

  “Don’t overreact,” he said. “She’s a nice voice at the moment, nothing more. Like one of the ones that sing. Except that she just talks.”

  “Did you ask her how she got in?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, what did she say?”

  “She encouraged me to think of a better question.”

  I glared at Boudicca; no wonder she’d been filling out lately. “Maybe she feeds your fish too.”

  “Haha, maybe. But while we’re talking about this, could you do me a favor? I don’t think she wants to be seen, so if you let yourself in and happen to notice that she’s around just leave immediately, OK?”

  “OK, Ched. No problem.”

  Just another day in the lives of two boys from Bezin. Still, I checked every room in Ched’s wing of the house before I left. His alarm system’s in working order and none of his valuables have moved. For now.

  —

  CHED’S PHONE GIRLFRIEND earned me the first direct smile I’d got from Aisha in weeks. “You stupid boys,” she said, lovingly. A string of text messages appeared on her phone and her smile vanished as if it had never been.

  “Brace yourself,” Noor shouted from the next room. “It’s Matyas Füst’s apology.”

  Day wasn’t ready to leave her bubble bath—“Oh no, no apology for me, thank you,” so Aisha grabbed a couple of foam stress balls, jumped onto Noor’s lap, and said: “Go.” We watched and listened to Matyas Füst singing a song about a girl who walked the earth in a dress made of needles that she couldn’t remove without maiming herself. People with good intentions kept trying to pull the needles out and give her something soft and warm to wear instead, but the needles pricked their fingers so much that they gave up. Then the girl met a bad man who drove the needles in deeper. Not with a hammer, but with his hands, for the thrill of joining his own torture to hers. Luckily, luckily the bad man managed to bleed out before he could kill her—it turned out his bones were magnetic(?). I might have misunderstood that part of the song, but whatever it was about his bones, they drew the needles from her and into him, he died in the utmost agony, the end. I kept waiting for Füst to wink, but he didn’t.

  “My favorite thing about this song is the way it starts out all about her and ends up all about him,” Noor said, as we refreshed the page and fat red love hearts accumulated in the comments beneath the video.

  Matyas understands

  This is exactly how I’m feeling today

  Thank you Matyas

  Think we can all agree he shouldn’t have done it in the first place but now he’s done the decent thing

  We forgive u

  All I could say was: “Amazing.”

  How did it go from “Füst should apologize to the woman he beat up” to “Füst should apologize to his fiancée” to “Füst should apologize to us”?

  Aisha spoke through the stress ball she’d stuffed into her mouth, removed it, and started again: “Maybe this is a piece of conceptual art? Like something out of one of Matyas’s favorite films. Couldn’t YouTube woman be an artist who’s worked out a concept that uses the media to show us something about fame and its . . . its magic touch? So what if that touch is a punch? She’s famous now. Maybe she’s trying to get us thinking about the different ways people get famous. By excelling at something, or by suffering publicly. Maybe what that eyewitness saw was a performance? What if she already had an agreement with Matyas that he would beat her up for the concept? Doesn’t it seem like there’s no way to avoid getting punched by someone or other? Doesn’t matter who you are, it’s just a fact of life. So isn’t it a little better if you get to choose who punches you? You know, I think if I could pick I would have chosen him too.”

  She was doing well until Noor, who’d stopped me from countering every single one of her speculations, said: “Ah, darling. Would you?” Then she buried her head in her dad’s jumper and howled. We couldn’t tell if it was heartbreak, rage, mirth, or simply the difficulty she was having unimagining Mr. Matyas Füst.

  —

  THE REHABILITATION of Matyas Füst was in full swing. His compulsory course of therapy was over, but he was continuing of his own accord. His fiancée quietly moved back into his house and he was doing a fuckload of charity work. The charity work was the last straw for me. Before I explain the part I may or may not have played in another man’s complete mental and physical breakdown I just have to quickly praise myself here. Yes, I have to be the one to do it; nobody else even understood how patient I was with Aisha’s mourning process in the midst of every other grief-worthy event going on in the world. Aisha herself was in a hurry to attain indifference to “the Füst matter” but you can’t rush these things. The cackling with which Aisha greeted YouTube woman’s simple and dignified acceptance of Matyas Füst’s apology, that cackling was not ideal. Words were better, a little less opaque, so I was patient with her outbursts. More patient than Jesus himself!

  The first I knew of my contribution to the charity of Matyas Füst’s choice was an e-mail that arrived while I was pursuing quotes from satisfied customers. The e-mail thanked me for my ten-thousand-pound auction bid—the winning bid!—and expressed hope that my daughter Aisha would enjoy the private concert that Matyas Füst would accordingly perform for her. Ten thousand of my strong and painstakingly saved pounds, Matyas Füst, that was all I was able to compute. Oh, and I saw red arrows between the two. Ten thousand pounds to Matyas Füst. I had some sort of interlude after that, running between my keyboard and the nearest wall, flapping my hands and c
hoking. Tyche came into my office, glanced at my computer screen, threw a glass of water in my face, and left. That got me to sit back down, at least. Five minutes later Aisha Skyped me from her school computer lab. I accepted the call, put my face right up to the camera, and bellowed her name until she resorted to typing:

  OMG PLS CALM DOWN

  YOU’VE GOT TO CALM DOWN

  I’M CASHING THE VOUCHER

  I SAID I’M CASHING THE VOUCHER!

  “What voucher?” I asked the camera.

  Aisha held up a finger, rummaged in her schoolbag and held up a voucher I’d given her on her last birthday, the last of a booklet of six. There in my own handwriting were the words: This voucher entitles you to one completely fair and wrath-free hearing.